“The wxWidgets toolkit contains powerful, cross-platform tools for graphical user interface development. In addition to its native C++, several languages offer wrappers for use with the toolkit. Learn how to use the wxWidgets toolkit to create elegant and highly useful GUIs in your language of choice.”
WxWidgets has been bundled into OS X since Tiger, so at least one OS already has the library available to you.
This is news to me. To my knowledge, wxWidgets doesn’t ship with Tiger. I had to build my own from source.
On my Macbook, there is some libwx_*.2,5.3.dylib in /usr/lib/, unless fink installes things outside /sw/ they were installed by default or xcode.
http://lists.apple.com/archives/student-dev/2005/Jun/msg00176.html
This link is sixteen months old. Draw your own conclusions.
Docummentation is horrible.. It’s even worse than Gtkmm. I just can’t figure out anything from it. They should learn from Qt and documment it as well.
Really? There are a few strange things, but in general I think it’s pretty easy to use if you look at the examples and documentation. Also, there’s a great book:
http://wxwidgets.org/docs/book/
The thing I missed was the signals and slots mechanism from Qt, but the wxWidgets mechanism isn’t unusable by any means… just takes a little getting used to.
http://www.wxwidgets.org/wiki/index.php/Development:_wxWidgets_3
Currently wxwidgets is a bit too messy for me.
I think it will take ages :/
i have only experiences with IB, does not exist in open source a tool like that?
There are commercial tools for that
Really. The API is full of corner cases where special treatment is needed (Notebooks vs Sizers, for example). This somewhate defies truely object-oriented approaches. There aren’t any GUI builders available that could take on the excellent glade. Even the commercial DialogBlocks is just barely usable.
The worst thing for me about wxWidgets is that the Unix/GTK2 port is really terrible, though. REALLY terrible. As bad as it can get. Slow, bloated and bugged!
Working with GTK proved to be much more straightforward and faster. OSX support is around the corner. Yes, it doesn’t look “native”, but wxWidgets neither does on Linux. It looks somewhat different from vanilla GTK.
Even GTK’s documentation is better. It isn’t as good in terms of quantity, but the quality is just so much higher.
It doesn’t always use gtk widgets directly. wxGTK itself does some dirty widget *painting* that hasn’t been seen on unix GUI toolkits for many years.
Sadly it’s the only true cross-platform toolkit now. I bet things would be a lot of better if it’s not intended to run on the stone-aged windows API.
Sadly it’s the only true cross-platform toolkit now.
Huh? What about Qt? What disqualifies it? I write *true* cross-platform code with Qt professionally. It’s what I do. Currently I’m porting a client’s ancient MFC-4.0 code to WinXP, Mac OSX, Linux and multiple flavors of Unix. On each platform the appropriate *native* low level libraries are used. Heck, in 4.2 dialog buttons even get reordered according to platform!
How is this not “true cross-platform”?
While you may have a personal dislike for Qt, and find it doesn’t meet your project’s needs, you cannot argue that it is not true cross-platform. Because it is.
While not fully complete yet, check out Dabo at http://www.dabodev.com . It is geared towards db apps but the wrapping of wxPython make building GUI apps fairly simple. It also has individual apps for code editing and form design – adding sizers, buttons, labels, etc. is a point and click process. There is also an AppWizard that makes creating a single table db front-end with full search capability very quick ( less than 5 minutes ) that is cross-platform ( at least for Linux, Mac, and Windows ).
If you are unhappy with wxWidgets, miss visual dialog designer or want platform that is both much easier to develop with (because it is not based on imitating MFC) and very fast at the runtime, you can consider trying BSD licensed Ultimate++ (http://upp.sourceforge.net)